The
first time I met him Higgins totally shook me up when he told
me why he came to live in Brooklyn.

"I came to live in Brooklyn to avoid dying
of natural causes," he said.

I was struck dumb for a second, then said, "You're
kidding."

But he wasn't.

Higgins,
a dumpling of a man with an apple face, black seeds for eyes,
and a short neck, had a bald head and a fringe of hair like a
friar. He was about five foot six in elevator shoes and worked
as an assistant in a laboratory that did research on what he called
'the innocent mice.' The way Higgins described his job I pictured
the mice on crutches or in wheel chairs suffering terrible cramps.
He felt sorry for those mice, injected with hepatitis, flu, and
kidney problems.

Higgins
certainly had some strange ideas. We were having a cup of coffee
in a cafeteria once when I told him I was thinking of going on
a little vacation. Instead of asking me where, which is what you
would expect him to ask, he says, "I know people who never
came back."

"From where?" It was me who asked
him.

"From anywhere," he says. "They
weren't even on vacation."

"What are you talking about?" I ask.

He clammed up and left, his teeth clamped together,
his chin jutting out.

A few weeks later I found out by accident that
years ago two of his teenage cousins had disappeared in Arizona
during a kite flying contest they had traveled to take part in,
sucked up by a cyclone. When I met him again in the cafeteria
he was calm and friendly until I mentioned that I might be going
out west.

"Two
of my cousins got sucked up by a cyclone there," he told
me, "and neither they or their kites were ever seen again.
Have a good time." Without finishing his coffee he got up
and walked out tearing his paper napkin to shreds.

It
must have been months before I ran into Higgins again, this time
in the library, one of my favorite haunts. He came over and sat
down next to me with the book he was about to check out, "How
The World Will End." I happened to be examining a collection
of best loved nature poetry.

"Isn't this a great line?" I asked
him. "'I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as
a tree.'"

"That,"
he says, "is a guy kicking his own art in the ass. It's as
if an MD would write, 'I think no doctor ever sees a healthy person
as lovely as a disease-'" The librarian stole over as they
always do and told us to shut up. Higgins took off. As it turned
out, Higgins coming to Brooklyn to avoid dying of natural causes,
as he saw them, made sense. Bit by bit I discovered that Higgins
came from a sort of doomed family. Not only had his cousins been
sucked up by a cyclone, but his aunt and uncle were buried by
a snow avalanche in Switzerland, his sister's sister-in-law, an
Italian, and her husband, visiting relatives in a Sicilian village
were trapped in the sudden blowout of a volcano shortly after
one of Higgins' grandfathers became separated from his party on
a tour of Africa and got eaten by a tiger.

There
was even more, but I didn't want to hear it. It all came out in
an explosion one afternoon on the beach. I spotted him sitting
under a huge umbrella, a thick layer of suntan lotion on his face.
When he found out how much I knew he said, "It's like a hard
boiled egg in its shell that keeps growing in my chest. And if
you think that I had it bad, lemme inform you you don't know the
half of it." Whereupon Higgins begins a recitation of facts
and figures he gathered over the years.

"There
are things people take for granted, never question, things the
whole world accepts as life's greatest gifts. And those are the
very ones waiting to slam you a whammy. Sleep is supposed to be
such a great thing, but did you ever have nightmares? And what
about friends, everybody thinks so much of? Most of them turn
out to be phony, they talk behind your back about you. But the
worst of all is nature itself."

I couldn't believe him. "Nature?"
I cried. "Man is a part of nature. He IS nature!"

"You been taken in like everybody else!
Oh, the breath-taking mountains! Oh, the mighty oceans! Oh, the
deserts and forests! Don't you understand they're killers? Nature
is out to kill you from the day you have to breathe her air- and
miss six breaths and you're finished. But that's the least of
it!" Instead of being the planet's most beautiful asset,
nature, Higgins assured me is its most vicious enemy. He planned
to expose the whole rotten mess in a book he was writing, 'Our
Planet: Mother Nature's Bordello.' From the first flood, nature
had been the outstanding enemy of mankind. You couldn't argue
with him. He had all the facts in a little notebook he carried
around that wiped up the floor with any of your arguments.

"How would you have liked to be in Bangladesh
in May 1985 when ten thousand people were blown away in typhoons?"
Higgins demanded. "Or take the Peruvian earthquake in 1971.
That was a neat little trick. Nature ate up 66,000 in one night.
A monsoon in India only rubbed out 1,217, all drowned. But you
would have loved the daddy of them all, the Huang Ho river in
China in 1887 when nature swallowed 900,000 people in just a couple
of gulps. Nature is out to get us all before our time. What's
coming next is an inside job. She's got viruses that kill the
antibiotics we thought were gonna save us from horrible diseases.
It's nature or us. That's it."

Higgins gave a deep sigh.

"I came here because there are no major
cataclysms in Brooklyn. It's one of the safest places in America,
even if there is a once in a while snow storm. I work in the lab
because I want to see in advance which killers nature is working
on to get us. And I don't go on vacations. You run to see some
famous sight and get trapped in a landslide, or get burned in
a forest fire, or drowned in a tidal wave. Nature is a fake and
a fraud. She's no mother, brother."

As
if nature heard him curse her, when Higgins went on a picnic in
Prospect Park, one of Brooklyn's prettiest, he should have known
better than to stand under the trees in the thunderstorm that
suddenly hit. He got struck by lightning and went up in a cloud
of smoke. But he sure convinced me that too much fooling around
with nature is certainly taking your life in your hands. The way
we're tearing her apart you can hardly blame her for getting mad.